Wonderments

Our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot 
be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily 
haunts us with dying mementos, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration. 
                                                                              —Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial

A day of quiet wonder in my hands 
holding nothing but bewilderment 
at the green world knocking on my window— 
I am alive! fresh from harrowing 
my address book, a kind of columbarium 
page-after-page, of the too-soon- 
too-many-dead. Bob, heart attack, 
at fifty-five, Amelia, throat cancer, sixty, 
Jane, double-vaccinated, Covid, seventy, 
all of them here, then a moment, suddenly—